Which Foods Benefit From Organic Origins Best?

Top Foods To Buy Organic…

These recommendations aren’t specifically tailored to the paleo diet, but they are and should be considered best practice or become part of the norm when it comes to food purchases .The goal is to focus on what good food should look and taste like. Generally speaking the best place to find good quality food products is at places where as little commercial processes exist as possible.

Realistically, our best bet at finding these high quality foods is going to be at farmers markets or similar places where actual, real people sell great quality products to like minded people. I have noticed that the smaller the town, generally the easier it is to get your hands on organic foods. Large cities generally have supermarkets, so “naturally” they have non-organic food sources.

Having said that though, I’ve noticed that some supermarkets are getting more and more organic focused. This is good for everyone, however, if cost is important to you don’t expect supermarkets to be cheap. Organic produce, regardless of how much they actually cost to produce will almost always be more expensive. Interestingly enough though, I’ve found that dairy is the exception here. At my local supermarket organic milk, cream and even butter is cheaper or the exact same price as their non organic variants.

Dairy

Full-fat/full-cream dairy

Generally speaking, dairy is a grey area in paleo and primal eating spheres. Milk contains a multitude of bad compounds, some even contributing to the generation of cancerous tissues in the body. Fortunately, an excellent and global source of grass fed butter is Kerrygold, and with any luck you should be able to find some stocked in your supermarket. Butter is a great supplement to your fat intake, and if you make sure it is grass fed only I don’t see there being a problem with its frequent consumption.

Meat

Beef

Ideally we’d all be eating grass fed only cows, but because this article is focused on organic foods, we’ll stay focused. Organic cows will share much of the benefits to both their lives and yours as full blown grass fed cows will. They shouldn’t be allowed to eat pesticide laden corn and cattle feed for more than 70% of their diet for that particular season. Do you see how organic isn’t totally great, but it is a hell of a lot better than the grain fed antibiotic filled beef most supermarkets sell. If you are a fatty meat lover, make certain that the meat is of organic origin at the least. Ideally, if you are eating animal fats it should be grass fed or the highway.

Poultry

For the sake of accessibility, I’ll keep the focus here on chickens. They are eaten by more of the world than any other meat, and contain great nutrients as well as being pretty satiating and dynamic in terms of what you can do with them in the kitchen. An important note to make here is that chicken meat is often contaminated by the pesticides used in their feed. Said pesticides don’t get “stuck” in the adipose tissue quite as effectively as they would in say a cow or pig, so be double sure that if you are eating chickens, they are of organic origin.

Eggs

I’ve put eggs under the meat section because I’m not sure where else to put them, haha. Taking into account the fact that the egg does come before the chicken, it is important to make sure they are produced by high quality, pasture raised naturally fed chickens. In the wild, chickens eat bugs, grass and naturally occurring scraps. When it comes to chickens, organic variants are generally acceptably fed birds, and this is a good enough compromise to make.

Vegetables

Leafy plants

The most important factor to consider here is that the larger the surface area of a plant, the more pesticides it could potentially be exposed to. It’s almost that simple really. Because leafy greens make up so much of the paleo diet, they should be eaten in organic quality only.

Berries

The less a berry is treated for pests with pesticides, the more nutrition it has. Polyphenols are one of the greatest nutrients usable by the human body and berries are rich in them. Basically, the more organic, the more nutritious.

Other vegetables

Any food really benefits from being produced organically, and so you should align your most commonly eaten vegetables with your organic buying ability. Sometimes organic variants are simply unavailable other times they are insanely overpriced. You need to determine how much you are willing to spend and where you might make compromises.

Take aways

At the end of the day, it is important to eat high quality, preferably organic sourced foods. It is important because of the procedures used to produce non-organic foods are damaging to you and your family’s health. A good way of restructuring your food buying habits is to consider organic as a minimum, and in the case of meat, you should aim for grass fed, but settle for organic.

We don’t want to turn into riduculously fussy shoppers and eaters, but the reality is that if you don’t eat organic or grass fed, you are consuming something which is almost guaranteed to be contaminated with pesticides or the remnants of antibiotics.

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